How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

That said, for every time I've hated that someone got terse and clever, I've loved that I wrote something that _read_ well, particularly when returning to previous code I don't remember. Coding is like a language, you can use that expressiveness to be terse, to be rambling, or to be clear. Learning to do so is a skill that has to be learned (cost), but can be more expressive (benefit). Languages (or patterns) that restrict that reduce the cost, and reduce the benefit.

Consider, for example, that Python takes great pride in it's explicit readability, and yet it chose "lambda" as a keyword (making no one happy outside of higher math), that "def" was chosen instead of "define", and that one of the most powerful parts of the language (comprehensions) are highly prone to using secret knowledge. [] works differently than (), for example.

So, what you've described are all valid reasons that Perl has a bad rep...but I don't blame Perl for them anymore than I blame JS for the hideousness that is the DOM, or Python for the bad scripts that have been written in it. Regardless of the language, cleverness and/or terseness without regard to future people (including your future self) is just not a good practice.

It's kind of how legible handwriting is desirable, but not really the most important factor, when it comes to the amount of brain required to solve a math problem.

I assume that global variables would be horrible in such an environment, but typing out the prefix and maybe one letter of the actual name would cut the completion list down to a manageable size.

Perhaps apps hungarian started because it helped avoid common errors in complex GUI logic, then similar practices were carried over to the systems side where they were useful for mostly unrelated reasons, eventually reaching the world in general through the header files produced by the systems folks but lacking any of the context or history needed to go beyond "microsoft does it that way, there must be a good reason". Hopefully I'm just being overly pessimistic and extrapolating from massively insufficient information, though...

All kinds of functions everywhere validate their arguments; that doesn't deserve to be in their name.

People need to see how the code flows and how things are logically connected. That is impossible to do with reams of methods operating exclusively on member variables.

I guess this is just another way of stating the benefits of functional programming. People do modularization at the function/method level so badly so often that I often think talking about modularization at class level, is beginning at the wrong end.

So many struggle with modularization at small scale.